#126

Yeah, it totally does. I think it’s a particular hangup I have. I’m not sure where it comes from. It was suggested that it might be related to autism as my two autistic sons have specific censory likes/dislikes but, although their doctor suggested I do, I’ve not been minded to pursue a formal diagnosis for myself & therefore haven’t explored that any further.

I’ve not seen that MN video but will go and check it out now!

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#127

I was using ‘perfect’ in this context to refer to a recording with as few imperfections and distortions as possible, rather than a subjective evaluation of how good it sounds. Even leaving aside the question of sound quality, I struggle to see how anyone could argue that home recording was easier or cheaper 30 years ago.

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#128

Home recording is easier now it seems. With mobile phones enabling everything and everyone having access to them.

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#129

Thank you so much for posting this quote in its entirety. I’ve been searching for it for awhile and had been unable to find the whole thing :clinking_glasses::clinking_glasses::clinking_glasses:

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#130

I’ve done some more thinking about this, and realized that for me lo-fi processing is often about texture.

It can be like sanding wood, filing metal, or acid-washing jeans – smoothing out edges that are unpleasantly sharp. Or it can be like hammering sheet metal, stuccoing a wall, adding sand or gel to acrylic paint, etc. – disrupting a surface that is too smooth and flat and boring.

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#131

I’m not sure my pdf-copy is exactly legal, but since the Eno-book is nowhere to be found (except for fantasy-prices on Ebay) I traced it down … the other year (?). I’d be happy to share it if you’re interested.

EDIT/ADD:
The Eno-book is out of print. There is a pdf-version online that is a scanned paper copy. Since it doesn’t really compete with a commercial product, maybe we could view Google as the public library.

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#132

I just tape bread to my speaker mesh. White if I want a gentle warming and high end roll-off. Seeded rye if I want to introduce some mid-range distortion. Sourdough just turns everything to mud though, I can’t recommend it.

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#133

you should contribute some of these bread-based IRs to the creative convolution thread! would love to filter some beats through a warm baguette.

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#134

I mostly use a Cocoquantus with a decent reverb and then stick the reverb through an Elektron analog heat. I also have an old, half working ‘Where’s the Party At’ sampler for bitcrushing.

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#135

This is exactly how I feel too

#136

Thanks for bringing up the important question of privilege. To me there’s a powerful push and pull between lofi and privilege. Still today, meeting the expectations of pristine, state of the art productions requires privilege: at the very least, the time, resources, and opportunity to build the skills it takes to come anywhere close to meeting those standards. For some, embracing lofi can still be a way to chase artistic goals without that privilege. But then the proliferation of lofi gear as a market — even a space for innovation — also has to presuppose privilege.

Privilege (and power) works in so many interlocking ways!

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#137

imho a recording of the real world (i mean any acoustic source) through very expensive and simple gear yields amounts of texture too. A different kind of texture maybe, more about the revealing of grain than the smoothing of angles, but dare i say not very far from what i believe you express.

i don’t find them very enabling to be honest. Having recently had some voices to work with, which had been remotely recorded on modern mobile phones, it was obvious that the recordings were decent, the person were properly positioned regarding to the mic, in not-to-resonant places etc. but still, the sound was barely workable. I mean, it was frozen in its defects, very hard to abstract from the conditions of its recording, that is, through a 90 cents piece of SMD microphone thrown into heaps of algorithms to make it sound human.

My point here is that i don’t think clean sound is actually more readily/cheaply attainable now than 20 or 30 years ago. Audio consumer gear is more sharp and hard than clean. It’s not true to hearing, it’s aggressive, lacks depth and life, in subtle (or not so subtle) ways. That is, if we define “clean” as “reproducing the very tiny details of a direct, technology-free listening”

Maybe the pinnacle of “clean sound” in terms of production is Hollywood sound design, the (apocalyptic über-smooth yet extremely dramatic and extended) kind of emotion-manipulating sound-blob that pretends to exist when it just glides away. Because sound is like skin, its reality is ruggued, uneven, detailed, and like skin it is blurred in a univoque surface by the media industry.

In that sense, lo-fi is merely letting go of the pretension of punching people in the face with sound; lo-fi as the belief that gently suggesting a place to hear would suffice ?
But then, what is lo-fi as a packaging on over-produced sound ? A sneaky attempt at domination ? A varnish of satisfaction on a fine proletarian’s work ? A post-modern refutation of the control that was exerted to bring the work into being ?
now i’m all dizzy.

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#138

Electronic music has always placed an emphasis on timbre, texture, and arrangements, often prioritizing those elements over melody and harmony. I agree with the notion that lo-fi elements can be viewed as another way to add texture. I also feel the notion of “lo-fi” presupposes there is an ideal “hi-fi,” and that there is a hierarchy of sound where some sounds are more valid than others. Perhaps all sounds are equally valid, and the “lo-fi-ness” is dependent on context.

When we add field recordings to our house-plant-ambient music, we think it sounds nice. Maybe it gives our music a sense of narrative or the feeling that it exists in a specific time and place. We don’t necessarily think of it as lo-fi. Yet, if I record a band in an untreated studio and the microphones capture the traffic noise outside, this is now a “bad” sound and could be termed “lo-fi.”

Sometimes the sonic artifacts in a recording are part of the sound, and not just some unfortunate side effects that exist in isolation from the “true” sound we were trying to capture. If I record a piano to a 12-bit sampler and master it to cassette, I have achieved a bad piano sound when compared to a high budget studio recording. I have also achieved a very bad guitar sound, because it is a piano and not a guitar. But, maybe I have achieved a perfect “12-bit cassette piano” sound.

Does this make sense? Maybe “lo-fi” is a more relevant term for people who think of recording as a way to “capture reality,” as opposed to collaging sound.

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#139

For what it’s worth, I think lofi has slipped the bounds of its original inception as the counterpart/counterpoint of hifi. Although the term first originated as that, I would argue that it has gone beyond that. It’s more than a simple fidelity issue but incorporates a vast canvas of other aspects too. I’m saying it tongue in cheek but there’s an extent to which I’m serious when I say that lofi is a state of mind and bordering on a religion for some people.

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#140

I’m not entirely sure what “reality” consists of… I’m a big fan of the idea of participating in a consensual hallucination… Which probably has some external referents, but we can never be sure exactly what they are…

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#141

I guess my point is that when we talk about “good” sound, I think it comes from a desire to faithfully reproduce what we hear in a “live” setting, except perhaps without any of the incidental background noise you might hear live. Once we get into collage, synthesized sounds, and recording as a medium, the hi-fi/lo-fi thing is no longer relevant (to me), because all sounds are equally valid and anything can be interesting in the right context.

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#142

I think that is often the intent but that the reality has more to do with an impression of the sound, rather than anything like an emperical reproduction, for instance. What I think distinguishes lo-fi in this regard is the extent to which it is a highly mediated form of such an impression, or at least transparently so–less assuming, an invitation to fill in the gaps, so to speak.

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#143

It’s fun to think of the space within pure electronic music for the very same distinction. Hi-fi still has a place — market wise, a huge place, not just in the club music space, but all over Hollywood sound design as @ermina highlights. And deliberate attempts at resisting those conventions are as vivacious as they get.

I get that historically, a lot of the lofi/hifi distinction was caught up in the strict project of getting sound reproduction and amplification to imitate the various aspects of ‘real world’ acoustics. But that history itself was being contested all along. @janglesoul That Eno quote is just so lucid.

Case in point, talking about privilege and lofi (@ElectricaNada); Luigi Russolo’s simplistic noise machines were arguably an early form of privileged lofi: afaik their timbral range was for the most part an extreme simplification of the range of similar noises that can be coaxed out of traditional instruments. Almost like the 1 bit music counterpart to using noise oriented extended techniques on well designed orchestral instruments.

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#144

At the risk of going off on a tangent, defending the range of inaccuracies in his “documentary” ‘Nanook of the North,’ filmmaker Robert Flaherty insisted that: “one often has to distort a thing in order to catch its true spirit.”

I disagree with Flaherty and his methods, politics and any description of his propaganda piece as “documentary” …but I do think there’s truth in what he said if you apply it to recording music.

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#145

Hi Phil,

Sorry I thought I had replied.

The deco sounds great. I love it.

I would recommend it to anyone. There are a few videos on the tube.

S